Phenomena such as globalization of economies and emergence of communication technologies over the past two decades have resulted in the need for enterprises and individuals to work in distributed environments. The need to work in distributed environments has resulted in the need for people to collaborate and work on documents simultaneously.
Over the past few years, various solutions have been proposed that allow people to distribute a single document and work together on the document. However, present solutions have various limitations. These limitations include security of data being transmitted between multiple locations, integrity of data being worked upon, and bandwidth issues.
In many instances, while there is a single document being built, it is possible that some portions of the document may be more confidential than others. Solutions for collaboration presently available do not allow for distribution of selective portions of documents based on confidentiality of the portions or any such criteria.
Further, since present day solutions allow for users collaborate on complete documents, there has been no need to check consistency of documents based on edits from different users. Present day solutions use version control to maintain different versions of a full document and allow users to resolve conflicts in edits. However, in cases where users cannot access whole documents for editing, there is no way users themselves can check and resolve conflicts.
Furthermore, present day solutions on collaboration do not consider the fact that different people may have different bandwidth constraints. Consider the example of a backend Business Process Operation that involves multiple teams located in remote areas (such as rural areas) in developing economies. Usually, rural areas in developing economies do not have same level of access to various computing devices, the Internet and other communication technologies. Similarly, users on mobile devices using older generation cellular technologies may have limited bandwidth access. Present day solutions do not allow for people with such limitations in terms of access to devices and connectivity to access specific portions of documents to work on.
Therefore, there is a need for a solution that enables distribution of documents that addresses the concerns of security of information, integrity of information, and limited connectivity of users.